What’s different?

I received an email with a question:

I have a question, if Mac starts making Intel Mac’s … What will be the deference between a normal pc and a Mac? That would make them the same. The only thing deferent is the operating system.

Now, this is not an easy question to answer but I took a stab at it:-

Now to answer the question… what has largely set PC (running Windows) from Mac has been the Operating System (OS) and that’s going to continue being the case. Mac OS X is in most ways superior to Windows, I think. Now Mac OS X is going to run faster, get better battery life on notebooks, and probably be compatible with more hardware. Whether you could install Windows on an Apple Mac in the future, that’s anyones guess at the moment. Perhaps some people at Apple knows, but that’s it.

Truly, Apple computers have become more and more like PCs in many ways over the recent years. They use the same hard drives (IDE and ATA), memory (DDR), ports (USB and Firewire), etc. Apple have been making the motherboards and kept them under tight control, but now they’re letting Intel in on that.

So for me what makes a Mac a Mac is largely the OS – Mac OS X. I care less what hardware it runs on, although I think Apple makes some of the best-looking and most-reliable hardware there is in the computer industry. So just because Macs are now running Intel processors, that doesn’t make them the same. You can run Linux, BSD, BeOS, Windows, etc, etc on PC hardware, but that doesn’t make them all the same.

I hope that answers your question. It’s hard to answer because everyone has their own opinions and it’s hard (read impossible) to find the one true answer (because there isn’t one).